Day the Dinosaurs Died

Fossils are a big business; wealthy collectors pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, for a rare specimen. He put a lighter to it and vigorously puffed, wreathing himself in sickly-­sweet smoke, then went back to work. “Here’s a piece of wood with bark-beetle traces,” he said. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils.


It’s more parsimonious to suggest it was a known dinosaur, most likely a theropod, possibly a raptor.” He kept digging. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. The bottom layer was jumbled; the first rush of water had ripped up layers of mud, gravel, and rocks and tumbled them about with pieces of burned (and burning) wood.Then DePalma came to a faint jug-shaped outline in the wall of the wash. )“Between the ages of three and four, I made a visual connection with the gracefulness of individual bones and how they fit together as a system,” DePalma told me. He agreed to pay the rancher a certain amount for each season that he worked there.

It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone. Using the rope handles, DePalma and Pascucci lugged the specimen, which weighed perhaps two hundred pounds, to the truck and loaded it into the back.

Now watch.” With precision calipers, he measured the diameter of the quill knobs, then the diameter of the quill of the fossil feather; both were 3.5 millimetres. Next, he found a perfect leaf, and near that a seed from a pinecone. “When I found that, I thought, There’s no way, this can’t be right,” DePalma said.

“This dinosaur had feathers on its forearms. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere.

“Robert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard of,” Burnham told me. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet.
Using the tooth, he could conduct a stable-isotope study to find out what the animal ate—“what the menu was after the disaster,” he said. I think he can overinterpret.”After receiving DePalma’s e-mail, I made arrangements to visit the Hell Creek site; three weeks later I was in Bowman. “This is Cretaceous flypaper,” he said.

An hour later, when the plaster had cured, he chiselled through the rock pedestal beneath the fossil and flipped the specimen over, leaving the underside exposed. DePalma pulled up to my hotel in a Toyota 4Runner, its stereo blasting the theme to “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He wore a coarse cotton work shirt, cargo pants with canvas ­suspenders, and a suède cowboy hat with the left brim snapped up. “If the fish is dead for any length of time, those tails decay and fall apart,” DePalma said. Parallel, streaming lines were visible on its surface—Schlieren lines, formed by two types of molten glass swirling together as the blobs arced through the atmosphere.

The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft.

Traveling at over 40,000 miles an hour, it exploded with the energy of billions of atomic bombs.As molten debris, fire and smoke enveloped the planet, nearly 75 percent of all known species were wiped out. He wondered how a freshwater fish and a marine reptile could have ended up in the same place, on a riverbank at least several miles inland from the nearest sea.

“Time to plaster,” he said.

“I am very sure he has a pot of gold.”In September of 2016, DePalma gave a brief talk about the discovery at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Colorado. In late January, 2014, DePalma went there to gather tektites and sent them to an independent lab in Canada, along with tektites from his own site; the samples were analyzed at the same time, with the same equipment. “It solves the question of whether dinosaurs went extinct at exactly that level or whether they declined before. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized I called, and he told me that he had discovered a site like the one I’d imagined in my novel, which contained, among other things, direct victims of the catastrophe. “We could see when the cypresses were dropping their needles in the fall. Alice takes us with her as she visits a magnificent fossil site in New Jersey. “That really struck me. The Alvarez team calculated that the asteroid was almost seven miles wide.

“I squeak by,” he said. He’d also found scores of beautiful examples of lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with impacts; it forms when carbon in an asteroid is compressed so violently that it crystallizes into trillions of microscopic grains, which are blasted into the air and drift down.Finally, he showed me a photograph of a fossil jawbone; it belonged to the mammal he’d found in the burrow. Later, DePalma would store it behind a friend’s ranch house, where all his jacketed fossils from the season were laid out in rows, covered with tarps.DePalma resumed digging.

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